EXCHANGE: Potholes have adverse effect on village

SPILLERTOWN, Ill. (AP) - The front door of the old schoolhouse squeaked like an angry cat. Village President Jeanette Linck appeared in its frame and stepped onto the porch.

"60 no, 14 yes," she said, her voice booming like a town crier to those who awaited the news of the village's fate. A proliferation of potholes nearly tore the village apart. It had been a long day.

Several dozen homeowners, disgruntled over poor road maintenance, banded together to place this question on the ballot: "Shall the municipal corporation of the Village of Spillertown be dissolved?"

Voters soundly rejected the dissolution of their village. (The official tally was 65 against, and 14 for).

Linck stood next to a busted soda machine on the porch of the white 1800s-era schoolhouse. The historic building hasn't been used as a school for decades, but continues to serve as a community center, village hall and the town's sole polling place.

There were two people within earshot of Linck's announcement, both village trustees who had just left Spillertown's monthly board meeting shortly after 7 p.m. Tuesday evening. It was a short meeting. Village officials decided to postpone all regular business that night while awaiting word of the fate of their village.

"We had that many people vote in the village?" a surprised Trustee Ken Hurt responded to Linck's announcement. "There was only 16 people voted in the election in 2017. Brought people out, didn't it."

Linck said she was relieved by the vote that saved Spillertown.

But she wasn't nervous about it.

"I've been in politics for a long time. I don't get stressed out," the 89-year-old village president said. "It will either be or it won't be."

In this case, Spillertown will be.

Now, the back story.

But first, the way, way back story.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 207 years ago, Richard Bankston established ownership of what would become Spillertown by "occupation and tomahawk right," according to the Williamson County Illinois Historical Society. In other words, he girdled a tree or two and carved his initials into them.

Five years later, he sold the land to Elijah N. Spiller. Spiller's home became a meeting place in the early 1840s for the organizers of the first Christian church in Williamson County. From those humble roots, Christian churches sprang up across the region, including in Marion in 1843, according to the historical society. Members of the family also aided Rev. Clark Braden in establishing the Southern Illinois college at Carbondale. It operated as a Christian college after the Civil War, and before Southern Illinois Normal was established in 1869.

Spillertown, which is named for Spiller, was incorporated March 3, 1990, under the direction of Noah Payne, a dry goods merchant at Marion.

When it was incorporated, there were about 350 people living in Spillertown, U.S. Census records show. That's the year Spillertown's population peaked. The most recent Census count put the population count at about 200. However, recent events suggest that might be an overestimation.

And that brings the story to modern-day history and the events that nearly unraveled Spillertown.

In 2006, a developer from Marion platted the Country Meadows subdivision near Spillertown in rural Williamson County. He sought to have the property annexed into the village to allow sewer service to homeowners. A plat map was submitted to the village showing that the property connected to Spillertown by land at the village's southeastern edge.

"The village board took it at face value," said Jonathan Cantrell, the village's attorney. The annexation was approved. From then on, the subdivision residents paid taxes to the village of Spillertown, which amounts to a couple of hundred dollars a year for most homeowners.

Chuck and Almeda Gaddis were among the first homeowners to buy a house in the Country Meadows subdivision just more than a decade ago. They were looking for a nice, quiet place to live out their golden years.

She's retired from her longtime career as an office assistant in the Illinois State Police Crime Lab in Carbondale; he's retired from Ameren.

"We didn't really know we were in Spillertown as such," Almeda Gaddis said. "We thought we were in the county."

The subdivision is located only about a mile from the Spillertown Village Hall, but distinctly beyond the heart of the village. The roads were fine when they moved in, she said.

But as more homes went up around them, they began to deteriorate under the weight of semi trucks that hauled building materials in and out on Linck Road, a chip-sealed country road that connects Spillertown to the Country Meadows subdivision. (That's Linck Road as in the village president's last name. Her late husband was a developer, and the road was named for their family. However, at the subdivision's crossroads, it's misspelled as Link). The conditions have continued to worsen each year.

"Our roads, especially Linck Road, the frontage road out here, is really bad," Gaddis said. "And every time anything was mentioned to any of the board members, it was always the same thing: We don't have the money, we don't have the equipment, and we don't have the manpower."

"And so I got on the internet and searched about how to possibly get away from Spillertown. And the only way to do that was to dissolve the village of Spillertown. So I wrote up a petition myself, and had everybody sign it."

But she hit several speed bumps along the way.

"The funny thing about it, before I started all of this, I talked to the county commissioners," she said. "I know I sounded so dumb and ignorant, and one of them talked down to me. I didn't know. I was just starting out. And he flat out told me, 'We don't want you?'"

She was intimidated, but Gaddis carried on.

After gathering dozens of signatures from subdivision homeowners, she approached the county clerk. The county clerk looked it over and suggested she reword the language on the petition. She did that, and turned it in again. Then, an assistant state's attorney reviewed it and suggested further revision, requiring her to collect signatures for a third time on a third petition.

"I only had to meet half of the number of the people who voted in the last election," she said. "But then I exceeded it.

"And I think I ended up getting 26 signatures. She said that was all that was necessary."

Only people who lived in the subdivision signed the accepted petition, which she filed in December. Under state law, any objections to a ballot referendum must be filed with the respective county clerk's office within five days.

"So five business days comes and goes," said Cantrell, the village attorney.

"The village board decides, 'Well, there's a real risk that we may dissolve. So let's spend the motor fuel tax funds to improve the roads. If the whole village dissolved, they were told those funds would go back to Springfield.'"

The village has about $35,000 in motor fuel tax funds that had accumulated over several years.

First, the Illinois Department of Transportation had to sign off on the road work. "So they meet with this IDOT employee who has to decide how these funds are spent," Cantrell said. "They get this new guy, and he says, 'I'm not approving anything being spent in the subdivision, because it's not Spillertown." But IDOT had been approving funds to pay for subdivision road improvements in the past, village officials said.

The village sought Cantrell's help. In late January, Cantrell said he obtained a copy of the 2006 annexation ordinance with the plat map attached to it. "I start piecing things together," he said. Cantrell used property tax records to determine that the subdivision is separated from the village by roughly 630 feet along Linck Road. There are two property owners separating the village from the subdivision, and they aren't interested in annexation.

And a public road cannot be the connection that makes two pieces of properties contiguous. Under Illinois law, the land itself must touch, and in this case, it does not, as the IDOT worker discovered and Cantrell confirmed.

At this point, the Williamson County State's Attorney's Office got involved. "So the village came to our office and asked us to do this quo warranto, which statutorily only a county state's attorney or an attorney general can do," Williamson County State's Attorney Brandon Zanotti told The Southern Illinoisan. A "quo warranto" is a legal action requiring an entity to prove their authority to exercise some right or power they claim to have.

"Upon our investigation, we saw that it looked pretty clear that that subdivision was not contiguous to the village," Zanotti said. "So we filed it, and they (the village) didn't contest it. And so an order was entered, for lack of a better word, ousting that unlawfully annexed territory out of the village."

"So that's how we got to where we're at," Trustee Dustin Eldridge said in an interview the week before the election. He was adamantly opposed to breaking up the village. He knocked on 80 doors in the weeks leading up to the election. Signs were placed around town, encouraging residents to vote against it.

"We all want to continue for this to be our home," he said. "We like making our own choices. We've got some exciting stuff we're working on." That includes the addition of Easter egg hunts for the village children, and an envisioned gospel concert to bring people together. "We've talked about a weenie roast. We've started discussing this stuff and we want to keep it that way and be our own little place.

"There's a lot of history here."

But turnout for municipal elections is historically low in Spillertown. At the time, Eldridge was also under the impression that the subdivision residents would be able to weigh in on the measure. And though they had already achieved their goal via court order, Eldridge said he'd heard that some residents still wanted to vote to dissolve the village out of frustration for the lack of repair work on their roads.

Almost everyone believed the subdivision residents would get to vote on the measure, including Eldridge, the village attorney, the state's attorney, and the subdivision residents.

After all, they were the only ones whose signatures put the measure on the ballot in the first place. Cantrell, the attorney, said he believed they would get to vote based on two decades-old Supreme Court cases, the fact that they had been paying taxes for years to the village and the proximity of the judge's ruling overturning the annexation to the election.

But then it wasn't on their ballot.

Dennis Long, who rents a house in the subdivision with his wife Mary Beth, made it to village hall to vote only minutes before the polls closed at 7 p.m. He almost forgot, but then he heard a report about it on the local television news. "I yelled, 'Beth, my God.' I was like, 'Beth, I've got to go,' so I ran like a mad man up here." He was frustrated that he didn't get to vote on the question. Long said he didn't know about the judge's order. But he's had problems with the road leading up to their rental home on Maggie Lane since they moved in two years ago. "That road is just eroding away," he said. It's gotten so bad that his wife worries that it's going to tear up her new car.

County Clerk Amanda Barnes said that when she received the judge's order reversing the 2006 annexation, she removed the question from the subdivision voters' ballots. Barnes said that she handled it the same as when she receives official word that a school district has changed property boundaries affecting homeowners.

"If they are not in the district, I have to take them out of that district, which would mean they couldn't vote on it," she said. Barnes acknowledged that it was a unique situation given that the people who signed the petition to place the question on the ballot didn't have the question on their ballots.

Cantrell was a bit more blunt about it. "It's a total mess. A total cluster," the village attorney said. But in the end, it appears that most people got what they wanted, he noted.

Upon reflection of Barnes' decision, Cantrell said that was likely the correct result of a sticky legal question. Eldridge, the trustee, said village leaders are eager to move forward now that the matter is settled.

He and Trustee Hurt met with IDOT on Monday and surveyed their roads. They plan to spend their motor fuel tax money for a major road improvement project. In another bit of good news, IDOT has informed them that the agency can handle the contracting for them. For years, trustees, who are paid $8.31 a quarter, have handled their own road work. Hurt was thrilled to find this out; no one ever told them, he said. "I'm 68 years old and I've been putting 30 tons of cold patch on these roads for the last 12 years."

The village has other transitions in store, too. At its next meeting in May, Linck, the village president, is stepping down, as are three older trustee members, including Hurt. The village can have up to six trustees and a president. But they traditionally operate with three trustees and a president. They've already brought on board the three new people who will carry on the village's affairs, Eldridge said. It's not clear who will be named village president. Some in town hope Eldridge volunteers for the job.

"They are telling me I am, but I'm going to try to pawn that off on someone else. I'd rather be a trustee," he said. "But someone has to step up." It's not clear how the leadership post will be determined. "Perhaps we'll see who can throw a baseball the farthest or something like that," Eldridge said.

As for the subdivision residents, Almeda Gaddis said she was happy for the village. If she'd had a vote, she planned to vote against her own referendum. She wanted to be part of the county, and it turns out, she always has been.

As for their roads, Gaddis and other subdivision residents remain concerned over whether Williamson County government will take them over and service them. County officials have said the roads will have to be brought up to their standards first, and it's unclear who would pay for that.

But Gaddis said she's learned a lot through this process, and is less intimidated now to research the facts and take her case to elected officials.

"He would get aggravated at me for doing it, but I was persistent," Gaddis told The Southern during an interview in her living room on Election Day last week. Her husband laughed, and concurred.

"It's like the Mueller investigation. I'd think, 'God almighty, let this be over with,'" he said.

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Source: The (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan, https://bit.ly/2GcWXAV

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Information from: Southern Illinoisan, http://www.southernillinoisan.com